TRANSHUMAN - Do you want to live forever?

Blog Posts

A few months ago I made the trek to the sylvan campus of the IBM research labs in Yorktown Heights, New York, to catch an early glimpse of the fast-arriving, long-overdue future of artificial intelligence. This was the home of Watson, the electronic genius that conquered Jeopardy! in 2011. The original…

Twenty-five years after the world wide web was created, it is now caught in the greatest controversy of its existence: surveillance.

With many concerned that governments and corporations can monitor our every move, Horizon meets the hackers and scientists whose technology is fighting back. It is a controversial technology, and some law enforcement officers believe it is…

It was one of the most tedious jobs on the internet. A team of Googlers would spend day after day staring at computer screens, scrutinizing tiny snippets of street photographs, asking themselves the same question over and over again: “Am I looking at an address or not?’ Click. Yes. Click. Yes. Click.…

Our consciousness is a fundamental aspect of our existence, says philosopher David Chalmers: "There's nothing we know about more directly.... but at the same time it's the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe." He shares some ways to think about the movie playing in our heads.

Two hundred million years ago, our mammal ancestors developed a new brain feature: the neocortex. This stamp-sized piece of tissue (wrapped around a brain the size of a walnut) is the key to what humanity has become. Now, futurist Ray Kurzweil suggests, we should get ready for the next big leap in brain power, as we tap into the computing power in the cloud.

When we gaze up into the night sky, we look out into the past. Adam Frank makes this point eloquently in a recent post. And it is a point redolent with consequence in the field of physics. It is the starting point…